Captain Hook
Would you take seduction advice from this man?
by Gwynne Watkins
August 7, 2007
he first time we see Mystery, star of VH1's new reality show The Pick-Up Artist, he's wearing a giant faux-fur hat that several Muppets have clearly died for. As the series premiere continues, and Mystery's goth Austin Powers ensembles grow increasingly goofier, a casual viewer might start to wonder: this is the world's greatest pick-up artist?
I, on the other hand, never doubted it for a second. I've been familiar with Mystery ever since reading Neil Strauss' book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-Up Artists. And I've been obsessed with pick-up artists, a.k.a. "the seduction community," ever since a twelve-page flier for something called Speed Seduction inexplicably landed in my college mailbox. Speed Seduction, the flyer stated, was a 100% idiot-proof method of getting women totally out of your league to sleep with you, practically the moment you met them. My curiosity piqued, I turned to the internet, where I discovered that Speed Seduction is a combination of verbal tricks, psychological games, body-language cues and hypnotic suggestions that mimics what many of us do intuitively; it is a scientific method for flirting. The actual method is an elaborate series of very detailed instructions, like the preparation guide for a nuclear fallout: if she does X, go to pattern Y. If the response to Y is A,B or D, proceed to plan Z. Some of these "no-fail techniques" are downright hilarious, like The Blowjob Pattern, in which a pick-up artist tells a story about eating a piece of chocolate and ends with the subtle phrase, "You may think this kind of thinking is above me, but actually, it's blow me." Mystery's seduction technique is not the same as Speed Seduction, but they're remarkably similar, both couched in the same absurdly masculine language: the pick-up artist is a warrior, women are targets, and every aspect of your daily life is a strategic maneuver to get you laid.
In The Pick-Up Artist, eight luckless men subject themselves to a sort of seduction boot camp, helmed by Mystery. These "dateless losers" are all in their early twenties, save one socially inept forty-five-year-old. All of them wax pathetic about their pointless, girlfriendless lives, although two of them are model-hot, and the rest are — to quote an appropriate film — adorably clueless. While chubby Joe D. may not date Playboy bunnies, it's hard to believe that his smile never melted a girl in a coffee shop. Bad-postured Scott may be a geek straight out of an '80s movie, but hasn't he ever locked eyes with a girl over a heated Dungeons and Dragons game? Most of these guys seem like they'd do fine if they just left the bar scene and joined a club or something.
Mystery, of course, doesn't see it that way. Standing like the Godfather between two henchmen, he looks at the assembled contestants with derision and makes the virgins raise their hands (at least four hands go up). Are you happy with your lives? he asks. Do you want to be the person you are?
"I want to be James Bond!" blurts Spoon, the Asian indie-rock teddy bear.
Mystery lays out the rules of the game: for eight weeks, he'll teach the guys the tricks of his trade and send them out into the playing field. Every week, one man will be eliminated, and the last one standing will be dubbed Master Pick-Up Artist.
Wait a minute — this is an elimination show? I suppose that's the requisite VH1 formula, but in this case, it seems like schadenfreude overload. Wouldn't it be more fun and satisfying to watch every one of these guys get the sex he's never had?
Or maybe eight weeks just isn't long enough for that. The next scene involves each guy, in turn, entering a camera-rigged club to pick up girls. We watch them all crash and burn horribly while Mystery provides running commentary. Brady (one of the hotter guys) approaches a cute girl, and things seem to be going well, but Mystery tells us he's dead in the water. Pretty soon, her smile starts to look fake and the conversation seems forced — and Mystery saw it coming long before we did. This is the fascinating thing about pick-up artists, how bizarrely attuned they are to normal social cues that the rest of us don't even catch.
The downside: pick-up artists are jerks. After the guys' failed attempts, Mystery and his wingmen enter the same club and clean up. Their canned lines and practiced tricks seem unbelievably hokey and insulting, but girls are, almost literally, falling over them. The contestants watch the hidden camera footage as if they're seeing God for the first time.
"This is about a lot more than picking up girls," Mystery says to the group at the end of the episode, "this is about building a life." Oh really? What does your life consist of, Mystery, beyond going to clubs and collecting phone numbers? While I'm rooting for every guy in The Pick-Up Artist to lose his V-card, I'm dismayed by the possibility that they'll all turn into little Mystery clones, wearing leopard-printed leather and sneering at "nice guys." Right now, they're all Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. By the end of the show, they'll be bland, made-over and kissing Emilio Estevez, or whomever they want to kiss. Frankly, it doesn't seem like a very good trade-off. More than anything, these guys desperately want to learn how to have normal interactions with girls — and after Mystery's done with them, they still won't have a clue.
The Pick-Up Artist premieres tonight at 9 p.m. EST on VH1.
©2007 Gwynne Watkins & hooksexup.com.